Set loose by our Limitations
We now knew that we wanted That’s My Jellybean! To be fun and wacky, unfortunately we also knew that we currently had a bunch ideas that did not share a theme or visual style that we could see at the time. We decided to work with what we did know; to start we had no dedicated artists, a short amount of time, and basically zero 3D modelling experience. This meant that any decisions we made had to keep art time to a minimum, require only simple 2D art and have no animations. Solutions were not exactly free flowing.
Where it is – Screenshot of prototype
I guess we’ll thank the Colonel
We managed to get to a point where we could thematically give context to all our designs, if the game was set from the perspective of a child’s imagination it would allow us to traverse over the line into the weird and wonderful.
This step lead us thinking of things in a child’s room; what they play with and what they do. Initially we investigated the idea of everything being candy related on account of the jellybean, but this lead us to only a few actual implementation ideas with much still unknown. Feeling slightly unhappy we went to get some KFC (because fried chicken solves all problems right?).
I’d like to say we had some grandiose method for deciding the theme and art, however, one of the team members simply had a eureka moment on the way to KFC: for the game to be a kid playing with a Popsicle theatre. Most of the team were immediately on board: they were simple creations so the only animation we would need is the sticks bopping up and down. One member was not so sure, but as he was the most artistically talented he was asked to create the concept art, luckily he convinced himself and the rest of us that this was the way to go.
Where it started – original concept art